The present invention relates to a device, method, and program for exchanging messages with other participants in a chat session.
In the Internet, there has been known a chat system in which a plurality of users send messages in real time. The chat system provides a mechanism for displaying messages from others sequentially on a display screen of a receiver-side personal computer (PC) upon connecting to a chat server.
A problem which may occur in this type of chat system will be described below with reference to an example of a list screen 200 shown in FIG. 10 (Prior Art). First, as shown in FIG. 10 (a), the list screen 200 sequentially displays a list of messages from participants A and B. Moreover, an input of a response message to the participant B is started in an input field 201 of the list screen 200. If a new message is received from a participant C during the input process, the messages from the participants A, B, and C are displayed in this order on the list screen 200. Upon completion of the user's input, the list screen 200 displays the user's input message “It won't be true” subsequently to the message of the participant C as shown in FIG. 10 (b). This causes a problem that the message to the participant B looks like a message to the participant C. Further, in cases where the user receives a lot of messages from a plurality of other users in addition to the participant C during the input by the user, still more message appear between the response message and the message corresponding thereto. In these cases, there is a problem that the correspondence between the messages is more difficult to understand and therefore it has been difficult to establish a conversation.
Moreover, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-70994 discloses that a message exchange terminal is configured to transmit status information indicating an input status based on an input history by a message sender on an input interface to other message exchange terminals each put in a message exchangeable status and that other message exchange terminals are then able to receive the status information and to display the status information at the message display position of the message sender in a message log display region. This type of message exchange terminal, however, needs to monitor the input status, which thereby causes a problem of complicated processing. Moreover, in cases where it took time to input a response, the user might receive messages from a lot of other users and the status information is therefore not able to be displayed on the same display screen.